A Searcher’s Second Act: Building a $25m Holdco

So it's, you build it too fast. That's one. Okay. Second, this mixed culture of trying to be headquartered versus actually support to the company. I think it can be really difficult because then the opcos start to not feel that they can be really honest about what they need help with and start to feel like they're having to do work for shared service, which is not what you want.

I think the other piece is... And this is something we deal with, you know, currently is that business needs ebbs and flow. They have ebbs and flows.

At times, it can kind of feel like the shared service is spending more effort in one place and not in the others. And I think that's something you do your best to manage, but you also have to realize that will never go away. Like certain companies will have more needs than others at different moments.

But really watching that, I think, is something that can be really hard if you're not cognizant of it, because certain companies will, you know, as you buy them, particularly new companies. they have a lot of need up front to get set up and established.

And so I think just being very clear about ensuring that all your companies feel like they're getting value from shared service in a somewhat fair manner between all the different portfolio companies. It's been another thing. And then lastly, I'll just say, you know, it takes some...

Me as an, you know, me as a, where I sit, I spend a lot of time in operations. And so in some ways, the shared service center is almost another business to manage. And so it just takes the bandwidth of management to understand, like, what are the performance metrics for shared services?

What are the performance metrics for Opco 1, Opco 2? How do we ensure we're kind of all performing optimally?

And Eric, what about the critique that... Each business knows what it needs better than some shared or centralized resource would. Marketing might be a great example.

So your marketing, the instinct of what communicates the value proposition is going to be strongest within your opcos as opposed to centralized. How do you address that?

What we don't do is we don't necessarily create like the marketing materials and say, this is from TXE when we're advertising it. We create, we work with that company president to what does the, what does the customer want? What are kind of the materials that are needed?

How should we, you know, what is a good approach? And we do all that and we do it under the umbrella of the op code. And so from the outside looking in, the customers or the kind of industry shouldn't even see that there is a centralized marketing.